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Writer's pictureKaren Divya Shekar

A Fresh Start

I don’t believe we are given completely fresh starts in life. The past has a way of coming back to haunt us that we can never really make a “clean” break. Consequently, every moment we live, we live out the implications of our past decisions. Sometimes, we even pay for the mistakes of our parents’ and grandparents,


But I believe we can be more than our Freudian fates. We do get to choose, and that makes a “fresh start”, in a sense, a conceivable one.


I want to start afresh on my 27th birthday. Is that too much to ask?


After college, I went through this period where I began to believe that man was predestined. I believed it because of verses that I read in the Bible and my interpretation of it. It had to do with the fact that God has “predestined” those who know Him, to live a life with Him.


Take for example, the King of Egypt whose heart God hardened. Also, Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus, and the prophet Isaiah who God chose before he was born. And lastly, a prominent world leader Cyrus of Persia. I began to wonder if we were not all predestined individually, some to go to heaven, others to go to hell.


Read Proverbs 16:4 where it says “The Lord has made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.” God knows the end of every man from the beginning. He knows what my last breath will look like. He knows where I’ll go, what I’ll do, and how I’ll live. He knows what I’ll choose, what mishaps will occur to me, how I’ll respond to them, everything...


My life began to feel like it had been written out beforehand and I had no way of objecting to what was written in it.


Think about it. God knows everything. Your future isn’t a mystery to Him. So if He knows, isn’t the future already determined?


So how do I change that fixed, already determined Fate for me?


As I began to believe in predestination, I grew very angry and despondent. I told myself I would test this principle. I would refuse to live, and see what God would do.


I would lock myself up at home, meet no one, talk to no one, get no formal job, never work and wait to see what God would do. After all, in a game of two, if one player refuses to play what can the other player achieve?


One day a friend of mine invited me to lunch. After listening to my decision, on the way back home, she told me something that rang out so clear, I’ve never forgotten it. “You’re daring God to send you to hell,” she said. By refusing to live, that is what I was doing. Life is a game that you have got to play. If you do what I did and lock yourself up, you will be disobeying God’s commandment to be fruitful.


So, that’s the first takeaway here: you have got to live. If you choose not to, well, I hope you know what that decision entails.


But Life can be so hard and unrewarding. It can bring disappointments, sometimes one after another. And it never goes according to plan. The people you love often don’t love you back and that makes everything pointless.


But you weren’t put here to have your heart broken. At least not by God.


See, predestination, whether it is true or false, can’t have any impact on you as a person. Even if we are predestined, the choices we make are ours and ours alone.


You, and for that matter, no one else, knows the mind of God. We don’t know His thoughts the way He knows ours, so predestination can’t really affect us.


If God knew what was to happen to me on the 28th of February 2022, it couldn’t really affect me, because I wouldn’t know.


It’s only when you know that you were predestined to go to hell that the problem starts. Or, for example, if you knew that your best friend was. Since none of us know, whether we’re predestined or not, has absolutely no consequence on our day-to-day lives.


We’ve got to do the best we can.


I’ve got to do the best I can.


That’s why I’m slowly rebuilding everything I threw out. I invite you to begin rebuilding with me.

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